Subject: SC22 N2769 - PL/I Project Editor's Report for Plenary

From: "william c. rinehuls" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1998 12:50:14 -0400 (EDT)

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ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22
Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces
Secretariat:  U.S.A.  (ANSI)

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22
N2769

TITLE:
PL/I Project Editor's Report for the August 1998 JTC 1/SC22 Plenary

DATE ASSIGNED:
1998-07-21

SOURCE:
Secretariat, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22

BACKWARD POINTER:
N/A

DOCUMENT TYPE:
Project Editor Report

PROJECT NUMBER:
JTC 1.22.05, JTC 1.22.06

STATUS:
This report will be on the agenda for the August 1998 JTC 1/SC22 Plenary

ACTION IDENTIFIER:
FYI

DUE DATE:
N/A

DISTRIBUTION:
Text

CROSS REFERENCE:
N/A

DISTRIBUTION FORM:
Def

Address reply to:
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 Secretariat
William C. Rinehuls
8457 Rushing Creek Court
Springfield, VA 22153 USA
Telephone:  +1 (703) 912-9680
Fax:  +1 (703) 912-2973
email:  [email-masked]

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                      PL/I PROJECT EDITOR'S REPORT
                 FOR THE AUGUST 1998 JTC 1/SC22 PLENARY

Project 97.22.5:  Revision of ISO 6160 "Programming Language PL/I"

Existing standard.  No activities during the last year.  The US
(ANSI) PL/I group has just recommended that NCTIS and ANSI
process the underlying document, ANS X3.53-1976, reaffirmed 1993,
for reaffirmation for an additional five years.  

Project 97.22.6:  ISO 6522 "General Purpose PL/I"

No requests for clarifications or extensions in the last year.
Consistent with the SC22 confirmation of this document in 1996,
the US PL/I committee has just recommended that NCTIS and ANSI
process the parallel and textually identical national document,
ANS X3.74-1987, reaffirmed 1993, for reaffirmation for an
additional five years.  The reasons for this exactly parallel the
recommendation made to SC22 in 1996: the language it defines is
still in active use in many locations and that the availability
of the Standard continues to be of use in procurements and in
assessing conformance and interoperability.

Other Issues

While the internal format for storing dates is strictly
implementation dependent and most known implementations do not
have formats that would interact with Y2K issues, IS 6160 provides 
a "DATE" function that returns a two-digit year, with all the
vunerabilities that implies.  A replacement DATETIME function was
introduced into IS 6522 for the explicit purpose of providing a
mechanism that would not be Y2K-sensitive (see Annex B), but no
action was ever taken to explicitly deprecate DATE.  If there is
a choice for any new development, IS 6522 continues to represent
better practice than IS 6160 for this and other reasons.

Otherwise, there are no significant outstanding issues affecting
the PL/I standards.  We remain interested in the future of other
standards defined using formal or semi-formal methods, as we have
concluded that these are not consistent with easy or rapid
revisions or updates.

John Klensin
PL/I Project Editor

___________________________ end of SC22 N2769 _______________________